36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Goldstein Read Free Book Online Page B

energy. Don’t let that man pick me, Mommy.”
    But here was a complication: If her father adored her mother so much, as he self-evidently did, then why had he wanted Lucinda to be so different from Philippa? Why had he so extravagantly cultivated Lucinda’s intellectual pride and derived such pleasure from his little baby’s taking on everyone and whupping them upside the head? Why did he continue to tell that punch line, “Don’t let that man pick me, Mommy,” with undiminished relish?
    It was the first time she had asked herself such questions, and it made her unsteady. She didn’t know how to describe the feeling, and she didn’t know how to explain it away.
    It was a setback, of course, for Lucinda, to take up the post, lucrative as it was, at Frankfurter. The department was a bit of a joke, stocked with all sorts of flakes. Sebastian Held seemed the only one who did what Lucinda considered real science. But, still, the very laid-backness of the place was a welcoming change for the time being. She could regroup and come back stronger than ever.
    Lucinda took a rather implacable attitude toward the softer and more addled areas of psychology. She had to. Psychology, like Lucinda herself, couldn’t afford to indulge in softness. In some sense, she and psychology were similar, their fortunes joined, both of them with a lot to prove, with a presumption of softness to overcome. In the case of Lucinda, the presumption was the result simply of her being a woman, especially a woman who looked the way she did. She had had to put up with a lot to get where she was, and the putting up never really stopped. Look how precipitously she had been toppled from her perch at Princeton. A woman who thinks for her living always has to be on her guard, always has to cultivate her implacability.
    Deep down, she still thought of herself as shy. She had been pathetically shy as a girl. But at a certain point, while still an undergraduate, she had realized that shyness was a luxury she could ill afford, and had found that the best way of overcoming it was, whenever possible, to go on the attack. She herself had coined the verb “to fang” when she was an undergraduate at Harvard, where she had begun to hone her aggressive styleof questioning. To fang is to pose a question from which the questioned can’t recover. You could see the stun, the realizaton of helplessness setting in.
    Lipkin was already quite a bit past the one-hour time limit and was foaming like a mad dog. For all his bombast throughout the talk, he ended rather limply, hurriedly restating his claim that moral reason is a myth. Perhaps his mouth had run dry.
    Lucinda’s running patter all through Lipkin’s talk had seemed to indicate that she was listening to Lipkin as superficially as Cass himself had been. But when the call for questions came, hers was the first hand to shoot up—or maybe it was tied with Mona’s—but in any case, Lucinda Mandelbaum was the one who was recognized. Just about everybody in the auditorium had been waiting for this moment. Would they be witness to the first fanging at Frankfurter? She stood up. The gesture itself was uncommon in these parts, and it seemed to raise the proceedings to a new level.
    “Thank you, Harold, for that provocative talk. I think I speak for everyone here in saying how much we admire both your erudition and your ability to speak so quickly.”
    The laughter was good-natured. Lipkin’s smile was grim.
    “You’ve packed so much in that it’s hard to know where to begin. I’m going to restrict myself to the last point you made. I want to challenge your claim that the Milgram experiment shows that there’s no moral reasoning going on. And my objection to your interpretation of the Mil-gram experiment is an objection to your entire thesis that reasoning isn’t functioning in our moral calculations, that it’s all just gut reactions.
    “Milgram’s results are astonishing, but no more astonishing than the